The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer and providing convenience to users.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. In this regard, for example, improvements are being made to the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN). Further, for example, the evolved-UTRAN (E-UTRAN) is currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards.
One development in networks is the provision for localized base stations that may be individually owned and deployed in homes and businesses. These localized base stations are referred to as femtocells. Access to a network through a femtocell may be provided by a network operator, such as a public land mobile network (PLMN) operator. A femtocell may comprise a NodeB referred to as Home NodeB (HNB) in UTRAN and/or as a Home evolved NodeB (HeNB) in E-UTRAN. An HNB and/or an HeNB (H(e)NB) may be configured to operate as a closed subscriber group (CSG) cell, wherein the CSG cell is accessible only by members of a CSG to which the CSG cell is configured to provide access. In this regard, only mobile devices having an identity included in the CSG may be allowed to camp on or otherwise utilize the CSG cell as an access point to the operator network.
Although each deployed CSG cell may have a unique CSG identifier (CSG ID), CSG cells may be deployed in an uncoordinated manner and thus there may not be any network wide planning of physical layer identifiers for deployed CSG cells. Accordingly, multiple CSG cells connected to the same operator network may share a physical layer identifier on the same carrier frequency. A mobile terminal seeking a handover to a CSG cell may need to determine information about the CSG cell in addition to the physical layer identifier for the CSG cell in order to complete the handover. Although a mobile terminal may read a physical layer identifier for a CSG cell when engaged in an active communication in an connected mode, a mobile terminal may not be able to read this additional information when engaged in an active communication in connected mode and thus may have to drop or interrupt the active communication in order to read the additional information necessary to complete handover.